Current Affairs

Wednesday, October 30, 2013

***DANCE WITH THE ELEPHANT DID NOT WRITE THE FOLLOWING BLOG - BUT THOUGHT THIS WAS A WONDERFUL STORY! FOR THE ORIGINAL SOURCE VISIT: http://thechairmansblog.gallup.com/2013/02/build-your-career-around-your-strengths.html****

The best advice I ever received came from my dad, Don Clifton. It was actually a piece of simple, yet profound wisdom that has shaped my life. “Your weaknesses will never develop,” he told me, “while your strengths will develop infinitely.”

If he hadn’t taught me this, my development and achievements would have stopped at a very early age -- in college, probably.

I couldn’t concentrate in college and flunked or barely passed a lot of easy courses. Later in life, I was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, which made sense, particularly when thinking back to my college classes. Those classes were disorienting -- I just had no idea what the professor or the students were talking about.

Dad, who taught educational psychology at the University of Nebraska, figured out that my extreme weaknesses in classroom learning would never really develop, and that I would not follow in his footsteps as an educator. But he recognized that my strengths might allow me to succeed in sales, so he pointed me in that direction. Almost immediately, I succeeded at selling western record albums, history tapes of the old West, and advertising for farm and ranch directories.

Eventually, my best friend and I borrowed $5,000 and started a business selling market-research surveys. This was perfect, because the two things that inspired me most in a job were salesmanship and ideas. (I still love ideas, even bad ones.) Selling a wide variety of polls and surveys, mostly on the subject of customers, was a dream come true.

My work today has never really changed from that time -- it’s still predominantly about sales and ideas. I am forever indebted to Dad for the best advice I’ve ever received. So are millions of others.

Dr. Donald O. Clifton died a decade ago. He advised people all around the globe to build their work and lives around their strengths, rather than only trying to “fix” their weaknesses. His legacy is his late-life invention, the Clifton StrengthsFinder. This online assessment uncovers users’ top five strengths out of a total of 34 -- such as Achiever, Communication, Learner, Strategic, and others -- allowing users the potential to soar with their strengths.

It’s impossible to go anywhere in the world, from New York to Nairobi to New Delhi, without someone asking me about StrengthsFinder. Many of the world’s most influential leaders and organizations use it for their employees and students. If you haven’t already, I urge you to discover your own strengths and then build your whole personal development plan around them.

You’ll be in good company. Some of the most successful people I’ve ever known achieved what they did because they built their careers around their strengths, not their weaknesses.

As an example, our late founder, Dr. George Gallup, knew he’d never become a super-successful businessman. He once told me that he couldn’t even run a popcorn stand, and he was proud of this. But what Dr. Gallup could do was teach, and he focused all of his energies on that. He was so good at it, such a natural, that many leaders around the world who knew him have told me he was the greatest teacher of his time.

Dr. Gallup taught at the University of Iowa, Northwestern, and Columbia, and he never quit teaching even when he created the Gallup Poll. He taught presidents, world leaders, media elites, thought leaders, and students who would show up at the Gallup building in Princeton. He became one of the most famous people of the 20th century, and his polling changed the world.

Here’s another person who has soared with his strengths: Gen. Colin Powell. When he came to speak to Gallup employees once, he shared with us the observation that all he ever wanted to become was “the best soldier I could be.” He became a pretty good one, too -- not only a highly decorated four-star general and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but also U.S. secretary of state and quite simply one of the most influential military people in history.

Colin Powell is a soldier. George Gallup was a teacher. I am a salesman. If Dr. Gallup had tried to be a soldier; Powell, a salesman; and I, a teacher, none of us would’ve succeeded, because we wouldn’t have been doing what we do best. As Dad said, if you want to soar limitlessly, you can’t do so by fixing your weaknesses, but rather by using your God-given strengths.

Another notion about leaders is that each one needs to know his or her strengths as a carpenter knows the tools in his box or as a physician knows the instruments she has available, and a carpenter does not hammer with a saw. So leaders have different tools (strengths) in their armamentarium, but the better she knows how to use them the more effective she is as a leader. It is not so much what strengths they possess as leaders -- it is knowing accurately what a person has as strengths. (A leader may also need to know her weaknesses, so she can manage them.) This means a leader needs to know what his tools are and exactly when to use each of them. This explains why nobody comes up with a list of characteristics that describe all leaders. One leader may lead because he has a strength in relating; another may lead because he has a signature strength in competing, or conceptualizing, or courage, or responsibility. What leaders have in common is that each really knows her strengths, has developed her strengths, and can call on the right strength at the right time.

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

***THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE COMES FROM http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505125_162-28248286/where-does-innovation-come-from/ AND WAS NOT ORIGINALLY WRITTEN BY THE DANCE WITH THE ELEPHANT TEAM - WE JUST WANTED TO SHARE IT WITH YOU!***

Indeed, innovation isn't a supernatural event, a preordained occurrence that only happens to certain people. And great innovators don't go from zero-to-great in a heartbeat. More often than not, they stand on the shoulders of giants, see things a little bit differently, or benefit from timing, opportunity, or luck.

For example:

Steve Jobs didn't invent the GUI or the computer mouse, but when he saw them demonstrated, his mind was probably racing with practical applications.

Howard Schultz didn't invent coffee, espresso, or cappuccino, but he has certainly been an innovator in bringing all that to the masses through Starbucks.

McDonald's was the fast-food innovator, but I seriously doubt there are any real inventions under the golden arches.

Bill Gates didn't invent the PC operating system and he certainly didn't come up with the idea of licensing technology, but his business model - combining the two - made Microsoft one of the most valuable and powerful companies in the world.

Having spent my entire career working with entrepreneurs and innovators in the high-tech industry, these are the 10 characteristics and methodologies that I think define innovative people:

Where Does Innovation Come From?

Standing on the shoulders of giants. Contrary to popular belief, innovation is often far more evolutionary than revolution, more practical and crafty than breakthrough invention. Most of the time you're repurposing somebody else's idea.

Left brain - right brain balance. The whole left brain - right brain thing is a myth, but metaphorically speaking, I think innovation often springs from a combination of inspirational thought (right brain) and practical need (left brain). They say necessity is the mother of invention; it's probably more true of innovation.

Belief that you're special. Many, if not most, innovative people have this sort of childish belief that they're special, destined for great things. The thought of doing something new and different - changing the world, as it were - can be daunting. Unless you truly believe it's your destiny, you'll probably be too scared to even try.

Questioning conventional wisdom, the status quo. If you even mention how things are doneor should be done to a true-blue entrepreneur or innovator, it's like nails screeching on a chalkboard.

Vision. Oftentimes, people just have a vision of how they think something should be. It's really that simple. But they're also driven to see it through, as in the next bullet ...

Driven by the need to prove something. Innovative people are definitely on a mission to prove something to somebody and half the time I don't even think they know who.

Problem solving. If you're not a problem solver, you're probably not going to come up with anything that anybody will find useful. Control freaks are natural problem solvers - they can barely walk down the street without seeing all sorts of things that can be done better.

Passion. Without passion and genuinely loving and caring about what you do, you simply won't have the resilience and stickwithitness to see innovation of any magnitude through. It's never just an idea - you have to actually do stuff with it.

Focused brainpower. Athletes will tell you success is all about focus: you can't hit a 100 mph fastball or catch a 30 yard pass with defenders all up in your face without it. It's the same with innovation. Ironically, people who appear to be all over the map with ADD-like symptoms can have rare moments of clarity when it all comes together.

Work stamina. There's loads of talk these days about working smarter, not harder, taking more breaks, etc. While I'm a big believer in not killing yourself with work, if you don't enjoy working and work stamina isn't in your blood, you're not likely to innovate a thing.

“The biggest myth about dreams is that they are frivolous manifestations reflecting basic occurrences of our daily experiences,” said Chicago psychotherapist Jeffrey Sumber.

But dreams are actually an important part of self-discovery. (More on that later.) Below are a few fascinating facts and findings about dreams.

1. People with disabilities dream as though they don’t have them.

The following is an excerpt from a person who participated in a dream study:

“I was supposed to and wanted to sing in the choir. I see a stage on which some singers, male and female, are standing… I am asked if I want to sing with them. ‘Me?’ I ask, ‘I don’t know if I am good enough.’ And already I am standing on the stage with the choir. In the front row, I see my mother, she is smiling at me… It is a nice feeling to be on stage and able to chant.”

What’s particularly curious about this dream is that the dreamer was born deaf and doesn’t speak. Recently, two studies published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition have found that people with disabilities still dream as though their impairments don’t exist.

One of the studies explored the dream diaries of 14 people with impairments (four born with paraplegia and 10 born deaf who can’t speak). Thirty-six able-bodied individuals served as controls. August 2011’s New Scientist featured the research, stating that findings showed that:

About 80 percent of the dream narratives of the deaf participants gave no indication of their impairment: many spoke in their dreams, while others could hear and understand spoken language. The dream reports of the people born paralyzed revealed something similar: they often walked, ran or swam, none of which they had ever done in their waking lives.

Even more interesting, the article states that: “…there was no difference between the number of such bodily movements in the dream reports of the people with paraplegia and in those of the deaf and able-bodied subjects.”

The second study found similar results. Researchers looked at the dream reports of 15 people who were either born with paraplegia or had it later in life (because of a spinal-cord injury). They also included 15 able-bodied controls. Their reports revealed that 14 of the participants with paraplegia had dreams that they were physically active. And they dreamed about walking just as often as the able-bodied participants.

One of the researchers, Ursula Voss at Germany’s University of Bonn, believes that “dreams are tapping into representations of limbs and movements that exist in the brain and which are independent of our waking reality,” she told the New Scientist. She and researcher Alan Hobson at Harvard Medical School speculate that the key is genetics. According to the magazine:

The pair say the recent dream studies suggest that our brain has the genetically determined ability to generate experiences that mimic life, including fully functioning limbs and senses, and that people who are born deaf or paralysed are likely tapping into these parts of the brain when they dream about things they cannot do while awake.

5 Ways to Rebuild Trust After It’s Broken

“I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

Laurie and Frank were high school sweethearts. They married young because Laurie became pregnant and, being Catholic, any other choice was out of the question, so he decided to do the right thing. It wasn’t that he didn’t love her—he did, but as with all things high school and unfinished, over time, Frank longed for his lost youth. You can see where this is going and it’s not good. Laurie worked full-time to put Frank through college and law school. He worked long hours and she stayed home with the kids. As his success rose, they began to lead separate lives. He and his buddies would routinely frequent strip clubs after work and occasionally bust out for a Vegas trip which inevitably did not stay in there. One night after Frank arrived home drunk and passed out on the sofa, Laurie came across text messages from one of the girls wanting to hook up and that was the start of their particular fandango.

At first, he denied it, and then he became indignant, and finally contrite, sad and terrified that he would lose her. Frank realized what she meant to him, but Laurie worried incessantly every time he went out and would give him the third and fourth degree when he arrived home. Inevitably, a huge row would ensue, only to end in an icy standoff that would last for days. Laurie’s trust in Frank was shattered, and there was no turning back. They were lost in a sea of suspicion and secrecy.

Trust is the bedrock of what makes relationships work. It is the fundamental process of love and intimacy. When trust goes, what goes with it are safety, security, respect, love and friendship, replaced by anger, insecurity, anxiety, fear; the aggrieved person becomes like the police, the FBI, and/or the CIA. Distrust causes spouses to look through cell phones, check emails, and ask endless questions about “Where have you been and who were you talking to?” Life becomes laced with arguments, large and small, about what is really going on, rather than taking what is said at face value. In the intervening thirty or so years of doing therapy, there is not a thornier issue than the loss of trust, in whatever form it may take.

Trust can be lost through lies, rage, violence, drug and alcohol abuse, and, most prominently, sexual infidelity. Once it’s lost, there is usually a Humpty Dumpty effect: hard to put it back together again. Usually the behaviors that created the distrust are difficult to change, because they are complex and convoluted. These little critters skip and jump through our system like ciphers popping up in unexpected places, while giving our mind the best of reasons to be doing whatever it is that our bodies are pushing for.

The body certainly does vote, and when it comes to sex, nothing is more powerful. I have seen very wealthy and powerful people literally spending millions of dollars on sex, drugs, and rock and roll—all the while being in the midst of a marriage with children. The level of guilt is staggering enough to kill a herd of horses, but it generally does not stop the offender. The reasons why men or women cheat are multifaceted. They can range from loneliness, poor self-esteem, cultural entitlement, arrogance and/or sexual issues within the marriage or relationship. Our society is also rife with willing males and females who know full well that a roll in the hay will quintuple what they could otherwise earn, not to mention shoes, jewelry, apartments and cars. It says something about our world and the steady decline of moral imperatives. That being said, it’s trust that is the biggest loser.

Once trust has been lost, what can we do to get it back—if anything?

1. Coming clean does work—but not completely clean. Denial only leads to more distrust, so the truth has to come out along with the willingness to take responsibility for your actions. However, detailed truth can sometimes make the hurt even worse and compound the pain, and therefore the healing process. Couples can spend tons of time on details while losing the thread of what needs to be done to correct the misconduct.

2. Being defensive, righteous or casual about the problem never works. There must be a sincere effort to work out the issues, or the wall will never come down. The angrier you are, the less you are able to hear what the aggrieved one has to say, and the worse what they feel will get.

3. Talk about what made you do it. Opening up about your own struggle, the need to get help, and the awareness of what got you there in the first place will help to prevent further infractions. If there is a sexual addiction problem, you must be willing to attend SA (sexual addiction) meetings or do what is necessary to make it better. If there is loneliness in the marriage, take the initiative to make an appointment with a counselor. Talking about your feelings of alienation is the best way to connect again.

4. Be an open book. That means open your cell phone, email, and appointment book for a period of time. This is usually the hardest part, because any person who has lived that clandestine underground life of secrecy likes it that way. They feel entitled to privacy, and they become righteous and indignant. At this point, you will need to take a moment and ask yourself what is really important: your relationship or your privacy? It really comes down to that.

5. Renew your vows. Whether married or not, there is a need to discuss values about living life and what that entails. This may be the most important part of the process. Take time to talk about what you want, what got you into this mess, and what needs to happen moving forward. Write it all down and make a ceremony out of it. Invite your friends and family. Tell the world what you are going to do and mean it.

For Laurie and Frank, it was too late. Frank had gone too far, with too many areas to correct what had gone wrong. Had they talked about it sooner, there may have been a reckoning, but too much water had gone under their relationship to make it work. I think Frank did learn a tremendous amount about how to live with another person and about who he wanted to be. For Laurie, the wounds were deep and it will take time for her to trust anyone again. A word here to all those people out there who are contemplating something strange: there are a lot of people who are hurt by the actions of destroying trust.

Renewing trust is not just a decision—it’s a lifestyle change. It’s about coming home to yourself and your mate, and making it work. Keeping a relationship clear and open is a valuable process. When we lie, cheat, steal and do bad things to ourselves or others, we pay the ultimate price, and we lose what is most precious to us. If you need help, get it. If you need a change, then make it. Creating trust is a big deal, so treat it that way. There are many facets and turns in this very delicate and daunting process of trust. If it’s not dealt with properly, then it will torch your relationship until what remains are ashes and regret. If you can look at the restoring of trust as a learning process that will hopefully bring with it greater intimacy and love, then go ahead on. If not, then make other plans.

To
“pay it forward” means to reciprocate a good deed by doing something
nice for someone else. The concept has been around for decades, but
found new life after Catherine Ryan Hyde’s novel, “Pay it Forward,” was
made into a movie starring Kevin Spacey.

The University of Iowa’s
Students Today Leaders Forever organization embraces the practice each
spring with students traveling to various cities to complete public
service activities during their week away.

Last year, 30 UI
students participated in the Pay It Forward Tour. They painted a YMCA in
St. Louis, helped clean up and spray paint tiger and lion enclosures at
a Wildlife Refuge in Eureka Springs, Ark., and cleaned a history museum
in Trinidad, Colo.

“To work at each and every service project for
simply three or four hours seemed like such a small task, but when we
met all of the people who ran the facilities, their gratitude for our
time we spent there was immense,” says Megan Sempkowski, a UI junior
from Worth, Ill.

Dusold, who lives in Ankeny, has been on the
receiving end of acts of kindness, be it a free cup of coffee or
quarters in the carwash.

Each contributed $75 to the project, which purchased $5 gift cards to Starbucks, Fareway and Target.

“It
wasn’t the amount that struck people, but the gesture itself,” says
Rodenburg, who lives in North Liberty. “You forget how sometimes even
the most simple things mean more than some grand gesture.”

The
pair cut in line at the movie theater, purchasing tickets for the senior
couple behind them. The woman asked what they were doing. Her response
after they explained was complete joy.

“She told us that she and a friend started the ‘Pay It Forward’ curriculum for the State of New Jersey schools,” Dusold says.

“She was just over the moon, so excited to see people doing it,” Rodenburg adds.

The
friends don’t know if all their acts of kindness resulted in someone
paying it forward, but they hope some people found inspiration in their
efforts.

“It’s just so simple,” Rodenburg says. “When I first told
my husband about it, he said it was a great idea, but that we should be
doing something like this all the time. It really makes a difference.
You have no idea what kind of impact a kind gesture will have.”

Ready to pay it forward? Here are some ideas:

Leave a copy of a book you’ve read in a restaurant or coffee shop for someone to enjoy.

Study Finds Joy To Be Contagious

It’s long been said that laughter is contagious, and now, it turns out, so is happiness.

Happiness is not an individual but a collective phenomenon, according to a new study released online Thursday in the British Medical Journal.

The study, which followed almost 5,000 people over 20 years, found that happiness can spread through three degrees of separation within social networks, meaning that the happiness of your friend, your friend’s friend, and even your friend’s friend’s friend can infect you with a good mood.

“Happiness not only spreads from person to person but also from person to person to person,” said political scientist James H. Fowler ’92, a professor at the University of California, San Diego and one of the paper’s authors.

The study suggests that the happiest people are those at the center of a social network, Fowler said, comparing this contagion of emotions to catching a sexually transmitted infection.

“For example, in a network of sexual partners, if you have many partners and your partners have many partners, you are more susceptible to catching an STD.” Similarly, Fowler said the most connected people have a greater likelihood of “catching happiness.”

Happily, the study suggests that sadness is not as easily transferred through social networks.

“Unhappiness spreads, but it doesn’t spread quite as much nor does it spread quite as consistently as happiness,” said Harvard Medical School professor Nicholas A. Christakis, who is a co-author of the paper.

Harvard psychology professor Daniel T. Gilbert, a expert on happiness, called the new paper “stunning” in an e-mailed statement.

“We’ve known for some time that social relationships are the best predictor of human happiness, and this paper shows that the effect is much more powerful than anyone realized,” Gilbert said. “It is truly amazing to discover that when you replace the word ‘child’ with ‘best friend’s neighbor’s uncle,’ the sentence is still true.”

But some scholars remain skeptical about whether the new findings are accurate. Another recent study in the BMJ cautions that Christakis and Fowler’s happiness study may be skewed.

“Our study certainly does not refute their happiness paper, but it just suggests some caution that if you don’t take care to control for other factors, that you might be finding contagion where none exists,” said Jason M. Fletcher, a professor of public health at Yale.

Fletcher co-authored a study suggesting that perceived network effects could be erroneous. Using the same statistical methods as the happiness study, his study found that characteristics like acne, headaches, and height are contagious among adolescents, indicating that the methods used in the happiness study can produce spurious results.

Fletcher and his co-author, B. Cohen-Cole ’95, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, suggested that the happiness study could be biased because happy people are often friends and that their good moods are not necessarily influenced by each other.

“Friends select people to be their friends based on similar characteristics,” said Fletcher, “and potentially happy people choose to be friends with other happy people.”

He added that friends are often exposed to the same environment, including similar levels of crime, risk, and weather, and that those external variables could influence happiness more than a friend’s mood.

In light of these criticisms, both research groups plan to continue probing into the field of happiness with future studies.

“The whole point of science is that you want to capture a great idea but then retain healthy skepticism,” Fowler said.

joy of losing

Anyone born in the 70s to parents of an even slightly knit-your-own-muesli disposition must have encountered the horror of "non-competitive games". The intention was excellent – to show that vanquishing other people needn't be life's guiding value – but non-competitive games fall short in one crucial respect: they're no fun. (Sorry, Woodcraft Folk, but you know it's true.) Recently, by contrast, I played Gears Of War: Judgment on a friend's Xbox, performed atrociously and had a brilliant time.

This wouldn't surprise the Danish-born video games scholar Jesper Juul. As he points out in his fascinating new book The Art Of Failure, games embody a paradox: we prefer to experience success rather than failure; we enjoy games; yet games involve repeatedly exposing oneself to failure. Juul quotes an interview with the wife of one committed player: "It's easy to tell what games my husband enjoys the most. If he screams, 'I hate it, I hate it, I hate it' then I know he will finish it and buy version two."

This puzzle has echoes of the "tragedy paradox", with which thinkers have wrestled for centuries. Why are we drawn to fictional works that prompt us to feel unpleasant emotions? During a performance of Othello, philosopher Gregory Currie observes, you "want" Desdemona to live – but a director who tweaked the script to let that happen would be in for awful reviews. Is this because the sadness we feel isn't really sadness? Is it because the negative emotion leads to compensatory positive ones? (One recent study involved showing the film Atonement to hundreds of students; the researchers argued that it led them to reflect on their own relationships, and feel gratitude.) Or, most bafflingly, could it be that we're "ahedonic", seeking something other than happiness? What would that even mean, if "happiness" is just a label for whatever it is we're seeking?

Games, whether Gears Of War or Scrabble, give the paradox an extra twist: because they're interactive, you can't pretend you're simply learning from the experiences of others, or feeling grateful that you are better off than them. "When you fail in a game," Juul writes, "it really means that you were in some way inadequate." Of course, failing in a game is partly fake: in Gears Of War, I wasn't really being blasted to death by robot locusts intent on eradicating humanity. But it's also partly real: I really did fail to coordinate my brain, my hands and the controller sufficiently well to keep playing.

Why should this feel such fun? Juul gives no easy answer – though, actually, the most interesting thing about the "paradox of failure" isn't its cause, but its ramifications. It's a reminder (to phrase it paradoxically) that we don't really want what we want; that a perfectly successful life wouldn't in fact be perfect. Discover the optimal route through a game, and pleasure evaporates: try playing noughts and crosses against a four-year-old, making no allowances for age, and see how long that stays fun.

In some mysterious way, the continuing possibility of failure is what makes games worth playing. And life worth living? As the self-help writerSusan Jeffers liked to say, if you were magically offered the chance to know exactly how the rest of your life would unfold, you'd be a fool to accept, even if what you learned was 100% positive. Afterwards, living that life would feel like a kind of death: Game Over.

I was especially intrigued by the parts on how positive emotions and love can help your career by “drawing you out of your cocoon of self-absorption to attune to others.”

I often blog about finding ways to love your job. Some of the favorite articles I’ve written for Next Avenue and Forbes have been ones about second-acters who’ve done just that — pursuing their passions to, say, film a feature movie or open a red sauce joint.

The Falloff in Job Satisfaction

Sadly, though, older employees have experienced the steepest drop in job satisfaction over the past 25 years, according to the Conference Board research group. In 1987, more than 70% of workers 65 or older and nearly 60% of workers 55 through 64 felt good about their jobs; by 2011, their satisfaction numbers had fallen to 46%.

That said, I know plenty of people who’ve found ways to fall in love with their work again, even if they’ve been toiling for decades. They typically either have autonomy and flexibility in their jobs or are learning new things and meeting new people.

But Fredrickson has found that you can also find inner joy in the workplace through simple, practical minute-long exercises. Her bottom line: Find new ways to design your job around love.

I gave Fredrickson a call to find out more. Highlights of our talk:

Let’s start with the key question: What is love?

Fredrickson: Love is an emotion, a momentary state that arises to infuse your mind and body alike. Love is sharing one or more positive emotions with another person, a reflection that you are invested in each other’s well being.

What do you mean when you say, “Redesign your job around love?”

Fredrickson: Listening and supporting your co-workers can renew your energy, give you confidence and build resources to face tough problems. Feelings of connections and camaraderie spark resilience and a more positive work climate.

Create games at work and find other ways to open up and connect. In our office, we started a weekly card game at lunch. It’s made a huge difference.

Are there ways we can use love to understand our colleagues better and improve our work relationships?

Fredrickson:Eye contact, it turns out, is crucial. New scientific evidence suggests that if you don’t make direct eye contact with a co-worker, you’re at a distinct disadvantage in trying to figure out what she really feels or means.

Accessing this emotion makes you wiser. You become more accurate, more attuned and less gullible. You intuitively grasp her intentions. It informs your next move.

If you work virtually and can’t see your colleagues face to face, pick up the phone and speak with them. Much emotional information is carried by shared voice, as well.

What’s the root of unhappiness in the workplace?

Fredrickson: All too often the problem is people don’t take the time to truly connect with each other. Feeling pressured to accomplish more each day, you multitask just to stay afloat.

Every moment finds you plotting your next move, what’s next on your never-ending to-do list.

Increasingly, you converse with others through emails, texts, tweets and other ways that don’t require speaking, let alone seeing one another.

Love requires you to be physically and emotionally present. It also requires that you slow down.

Maybe all you need to do is stop by someone’s office to talk about something that’s not work-related.

What are examples of micro-moment exercises we can do to make our work life more joyful?

Fredrickson: One of the most powerful ones is doing a day review at the end of your workday. Spend a minute thinking about your three longest interactions. Ask yourself how connected, how attuned, how close you feel to the people you were interacting with.

You’ll get a subtle cue reminding you that each of your social interactions is an opportunity for something more than just an exchange of goods or information. When you learn to cultivate these each day, it’s easier to let negativity roll by.

You also think people should reframe what you call their “self-talk.” What do you mean?

Fredrickson: Nearly everyone has some form of inner self-talk. Maybe you worry too much, second-guessing your every move, expecting the worst at every turn.

Fredrickson, a leading researcher of positive emotions at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, presents scientific evidence to argue that love is not what we think it is. It is not a long-lasting, continually present emotion that sustains a marriage; it is not the yearning and passion that characterizes young love; and it is not the blood-tie of kinship.

Rather, it is what she calls a "micro-moment of positivity resonance." She means that love is a connection, characterized by a flood of positive emotions, which you share with another person—any other person—whom you happen to connect with in the course of your day. You can experience these micro-moments with your romantic partner, child, or close friend. But you can also fall in love, however momentarily, with less likely candidates, like a stranger on the street, a colleague at work, or an attendant at a grocery store. Louis Armstrong put it best in "It's a Wonderful World" when he sang, "I see friends shaking hands, sayin 'how do you do?' / They're really sayin', 'I love you.'"

Fredrickson's unconventional ideas are important to think about at this time of year. With Valentine's Day around the corner, many Americans are facing a grim reality: They are love-starved. Rates of loneliness are on the rise as social supports are disintegrating. In 1985, when the General Social Survey polledAmericans on the number of confidants they have in their lives, the most common response was three. In 2004, when the survey was given again, the most common response was zero.

According to the University of Chicago's John Cacioppo, an expert on loneliness, and his co-author William Patrick, "at any given time, roughly 20 percent of individuals—that would be 60 million people in the U.S. alone—feel sufficiently isolated for it to be a major source of unhappiness in their lives." For older Americans, that number is closer to 35 percent. At the same time, rates of depression have been on the rise. In his 2011 book Flourish, the psychologist Martin Seligman notes that according to some estimates, depression is 10 times more prevalent now than it was five decades ago. Depression affects about 10 percent of the American population, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

A global poll taken last Valentine's Day showed that most married people—or those with a significant other—list their romantic partner as the greatest source of happiness in their lives. According to the same poll, nearly half of all single people are looking for a romantic partner, saying that finding a special person to love would contribute greatly to their happiness.

But to Fredrickson, these numbers reveal a "worldwide collapse of imagination," as she writes in her book. "Thinking of love purely as romance or commitment that you share with one special person—as it appears most on earth do—surely limits the health and happiness you derive" from love.

"My conception of love," she tells me, "gives hope to people who are single or divorced or widowed this Valentine's Day to find smaller ways to experience love."

You have to physically be with the person to experience the micro-moment. For example, if you and your significant other are not physically together—if you are reading this at work alone in your office—then you two are not in love. You may feel connected or bonded to your partner—you may long to be in his company—but your body is completely loveless.

To understand why, it's important to see how love works biologically. Like all emotions, love has a biochemical and physiological component. But unlike some of the other positive emotions, like joy or happiness, love cannot be kindled individually—it only exists in the physical connection between two people. Specifically, there are three players in the biological love system—mirror neurons, oxytocin, and vagal tone. Each involves connection and each contributes to those micro-moment of positivity resonance that Fredrickson calls love.

When you experience love, your brain mirrors the person's you are connecting with in a special way. Pioneering research by Princeton University's Uri Hasson shows what happens inside the brains of two people who connect in conversation. Because brains are scanned inside of noisy fMRI machines, where carrying on a conversation is nearly impossible, Hasson's team had his subjects mimic a natural conversation in an ingenious way. They recorded a young woman telling a lively, long, and circuitous story about her high school prom. Then, they played the recording for the participants in the study, who were listening to it as their brains were being scanned. Next, the researchers asked each participant to recreate the story so they, the researchers, could determine who was listening well and who was not. Good listeners, the logic goes, would probably be the ones who clicked in a natural conversation with the story-teller.

What they found was remarkable. In some cases, the brain patterns of the listener mirrored those of the storyteller after a short time gap. The listener needed time to process the story after all. In other cases, the brain activity was almost perfectly synchronized; there was no time lag at all between the speaker and the listener. But in some rare cases, if the listener was particularly tuned in to the story—if he was hanging on to every word of the story and really got it—his brain activity actuallyanticipated the story-teller's in some cortical areas.

The mutual understanding and shared emotions, especially in that third category of listener, generated a micro-moment of love, which "is a single act, performed by two brains," as Fredrickson writes in her book.

Oxytocin, the so-called love and cuddle hormone, facilitates these moments of shared intimacy and is part of the mammalian "calm-and-connect" system (as opposed to the more stressful "fight-or-flight" system that closes us off to others). The hormone, which is released in huge quantities during sex, and in lesser amounts during other moments of intimate connection, works by making people feel more trusting and open to connection. This is the hormone of attachment and bonding that spikes during micro-moments of love. Researchers have found, for instance, that when a parent acts affectionately with his or her infant—through micro-moments of love like making eye contact, smiling, hugging, and playing—oxytocin levels in both the parent and the child rise in sync.

The final player is the vagus nerve, which connects your brain to your heart and subtly but sophisticatedly allows you to meaningfully experience love. As Fredrickson explains in her book, "Your vagus nerve stimulates tiny facial muscles that better enable you to make eye contact and synchronize your facial expressions with another person. It even adjusts the miniscule muscles of your middle ear so you can better track her voice against any background noise."

The vagus nerve's potential for love can actually be measured by examining a person's heart rate in association with his breathing rate, what's called "vagal tone." Having a high vagal tone is good: People who have a high "vagal tone" can regulate their biological processes like their glucose levels better; they have more control over their emotions, behavior, and attention; they are socially adept and can kindle more positive connections with others; and, most importantly, they are more loving. In research from her lab, Fredrickson found that people with high vagal tone report more experiences of love in their days than those with a lower vagal tone.

Historically, vagal tone was considered stable from person to person. You either had a high one or you didn't; you either had a high potential for love or you didn't. Fredrickson's recent research has debunked that notion.

In a 2010 study from her lab, Fredrickson randomly assigned half of her participants to a "love" condition and half to a control condition. In the love condition, participants devoted about one hour of their weeks for several months to the ancient Buddhist practice of loving-kindness meditation. In loving-kindness meditation, you sit in silence for a period of time and cultivate feelings of tenderness, warmth, and compassion for another person by repeating a series of phrases to yourself wishing them love, peace, strength, and general well-being. Ultimately, the practice helps people step outside of themselves and become more aware of other people and their needs, desires, and struggles—something that can be difficult to do in our hyper individualistic culture.

Fredrickson measured the participants' vagal tone before and after the intervention. The results were so powerful that she was invited to present them before the Dalai Lama himself in 2010. Fredrickson and her team found that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, people could significantly increase their vagal tone by self-generating love through loving-kindness meditation. Since vagal tone mediates social connections and bonds, people whose vagal tones increased were suddenly capable of experiencing more micro-moments of love in their days. Beyond that, their growing capacity to love more will translate into health benefits given that high vagal tone is associated with lowered risk of inflammation, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and stroke.

Fredrickson likes to call love a nutrient. If you are getting enough of the nutrient, then the health benefits of love can dramatically alter your biochemistry in ways that perpetuate more micro-moments of love in your life, and which ultimately contribute to your health, well-being, and longevity.

Fredrickson's ideas about love are not exactly the stuff of romantic comedies. Describing love as a "micro-moment of positivity resonance" seems like a buzz-kill. But if love now seems less glamorous and mysterious then you thought it was, then good. Part of Fredrickson's project is to lower cultural expectations about love—expectations that are so misguidedly high today that they have inflated love into something that it isn't, and into something that no sane person could actually experience.

Jonathan Haidt, another psychologist, calls these unrealistic expectations "the love myth" in his 2006 book The Happiness Hypothesis:

True love is passionate love that never fades; if you are in true love, you should marry that person; if love ends, you should leave that person because it was not true love; and if you can find the right person, you will have true love forever. You might not believe this myth yourself, particularly if you are older than thirty; but many young people in Western nations are raised on it, and it acts as an ideal that they unconsciously carry with them even if they scoff at it... But if true love is defined as eternal passion, it is biologically impossible.

Love 2.0 is, by contrast, far humbler. Fredrickson tells me, "I love the idea that it lowers the bar of love. If you don't have a Valentine, that doesn't mean that you don't have love. It puts love much more in our reach everyday regardless of our relationship status."

Lonely people who are looking for love are making a mistake if they are sitting around and waiting for love in the form of the "love myth" to take hold of them. If they instead sought out love in little moments of connection that we all experience many times a day, perhaps their loneliness would begin to subside.

It’s Saturday night and the bar is packed. A beautiful brunette is sitting at the bar, sipping a vodka soda and chatting with a friend. Out of the corner of her eye, she catches the glimpse of a man. Their eyes lock.

Findings about friends who click immediately might also apply to romantic partnerships. In one study on friendships, people who enjoyed the first few minutes together were likely to develop a close relationship after nine weeks.

But instant attraction isn’t just in our heads: There may be a biological basis to love at first sight.

Studies have found that animals are more likely to mate with partners they’re genetically compatible with. It’s unclear whether this research applies to humans, but some scientists think we might be preprogrammed to spot “the one.” Romantic attraction might serve an evolutionary function: We seek out specific people who will be suitable mates, and we give everyone else the boot.

But meeting that special someone’s gaze and falling in love may be a bit more complicated.

Perhaps surprisingly, women aren’t always the romantics: One study found that men experience love at first sight more often than women. Researchers think that’s because men respond to physical cues more readily than women, and women tend to develop trust more gradually than men.

Also, people might be more inclined to believe in love at first sight when they’re younger. A Gallup poll revealed that folks older than 50 are less likely than younger ones to think people can fall in love immediately (possibly because they’ve had more romantic relationships with different partners).

But it’s unclear how often love at first sight turns into a successful partnership.

One survey in Israel found that only about 10 percent of people say their long-term relationships began that way. While people can be instantly attracted to each other, some scientists say that being in love means really getting to know someone over time.

So don’t throw in the towel if that first date didn’t go so well. Psychologists believe more interactions with someone can make them look more attractive and intelligent. It may be worth giving love at second or third sight a chance, too.

***CLICK ON THE IMAGE BELOW TO CHECK OUT SOME OF THE 20TH CENTURY'S MOST FAMOUS COUPLES! FROM ELIZABETH TAYLOR TO WILL SMITH!***

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

On April 12, 2011, at approximately 9:00 a.m., students reported to the ROCORI Middle School principal that they thought they saw another student with a gun in that student’s locker. The principal, Cheryl Schmidt, took immediate action with the reporting students and was able to identify the student offender and the locker. The principal moved directly to the locker and was able to secure the weapon.

Wednesday, April 07, 2010

In the fall of 2009, the DigElog Waite Park team caught up with a construction crew that was working on a new new Highway 23 project. As you'll see in the footage, the project consists of sewer, gutter, and sidewalk installation. With some help from Mother Nature, construction crews were able to work late into 2009 and pick up early in 2010. You can see the team hard at work and although it may seem as though not much has changed, the project is still on pace to finish up at Summer's end in 2010. For more city updates, stay tuned to DigElog Waite Park.